Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They're not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they're happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws.

Even if you've heard enough about Terri Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why President Bush's political grandstanding in her case backfired. More than 70% of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration's disregard for local control, the rule of law and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.

Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For 20 years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace. You'd think this belief — that the most difficult decisions must be our own — would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn't. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.

The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell, and those we keep hidden. Many families have wrestled with end-of-life choices. But they're brought on by the illness and aging of loved ones, not by our own actions. No one judges us for having a sick parent as they might for our sexuality. So we're likely to talk in public about such choices.

But most women don't publicly discuss their abortions. Although a third of all U.S. women have abortions by age 45, they're more likely to view the dilemma as a product of their own failures — to use adequate birth control or to have the financial or emotional resources to afford another child. They're more likely to feel shame.

When the movement to legalize abortion began, advocates talked about the human costs of prohibition. They told the complex stories of why women would choose to value their own lives, choices and possibilities over the potential life of the fetus. They framed abortion as an act of compassion. We see this in the recent film, Vera Drake. Its working-class protagonist in postwar England views her actions "helping young girls in trouble" as part of the same ethic of caring as looking after her aged mother. Pro-choice activists eventually told their stories powerfully enough to convince America that its abortion policies had to change.

Since Roe, these voices have been neutralized by those speaking for the humanity of the fetus. Some oppose abortion from compassion and conviction. The motive of others, who also campaign against sex education, access to birth control and financial support for poor families, seems more like punitive vindictiveness. As the stories of the women involved faded, the reasons why women have always made this difficult choice, and will keep doing so, got told far less often.

In 1970 I had a back-street abortion. I had a young daughter of 18 months at home and was separated from an abusive husband. When I found out I was pregnant with another child right after finally having the courage to leave an abusive man, I cried and cried. This was before abortion was legal. I told a close friend who said she knew of a doctor who performed these abortions.

I went to his clinic, which was dirty and sleazy underneath an underpass in Metairie, Louisiana. I was treated as a criminal and so were all the other women in the room. You had to give $150 in cash before they would even speak to you. I was led to a back room where there was no caring or anesthetic to be found. It was very painful and I threw up immediately and kept throwing up for over an hour after the procedure. My girlfriend who went with me was worried as I did not come out right away as others had. She inquired about me and was led to the back room where she saw that I was in pain and throwing up. She held my hand and got a washcloth to wash my face and help me. She asked the nurse if there wasn't something wrong and she replied "this is how some of them get." My girlfriend was horrified at the coldness and uncaring atmosphere of the place. We left sometime after and she drove me home and called a friend who was an intern at the time. He came to the house and prescribed some antibiotics and pain medication. He was very kind.